PEOPLE FOR BLOG

The Hill reports that Democrats and Republicans in Congress have reached an agreement on the amount of money to cut from next year’s federal budget, just before tomorrow’s deadline for avoiding a government shutdown. Great news, right? Not so fast: while Congress has agreed on an amount to cut from the deficit next year, House Republicans are still willing to hold up the budget and shut down the government over funding to Planned Parenthood and clean air programs:

“The numbers are basically there,” Reid said. “But I’m not nearly as optimistic — and that’s an understatement — as I was 11 hours ago. The numbers are extremely close. Our differences are no longer over how much savings we get on government spending.

“The only thing holding up an agreement is an ideology,” Reid told the Senate’s presiding chair. “I’m sorry to say, Mr. President, my friend the Speaker and the Republican leadership have drawn a line in the sand, not dealing with a deficit we know we have to deal with.

“The two main issues holding this matter up are the choice of women, reproductive rights, and clean air,” Reid said. “These matters have no place in a budget bill.”

Any member of Congress who says his or her primary goal is to reduce the deficit and improve the economy should have to explain this. A government shutdown would be disastrous for the economy. It would hurt Americans, and it would almost certainly result in lost jobs. That House Republicans are willing to inflict economic suffering just so they can make a point about contraception and lend a hand to corporate polluters shows just how little they actually care about the deficit or about job creation.

Earlier this year, Senators David Vitter and Rand Paul introduced a constitutional amendment to eliminate one of the key advancements in liberty in American history: the citizenship provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, a necessary reform that was made possible only at the horrendous cost of four years of bloody war. Correcting the mistakes of the past, Americans guaranteed the promises of liberty and equality available for all who were born here. The senators' proposed constitutional amendment was a shameful statement that those who adopted the Fourteenth Amendment had made a mistake.

Even though both senators had also (falsely) claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment did not confer citizenship on people born here to undocumented immigrants, their introduction of a constitutional amendment suggested a recognition that writing millions of Americans out of the Constitution would effect a fundamental change in our nation's character.

However, as Andrea Nill reports in Think Progress, Vitter and Paul have managed to take their hostility toward millions of Latinos to the next level:

This week, the two senators addressed the legislative dissonance by introducing a bill that's essentially a carbon copy of Rep. Steve King's (R-IA) birthright citizenship proposal in the House. Vitter and Paul, along with Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Jerry Moran (R-KS), say their legislation "requires the federal government to limit automatic citizenship to children born to at least one parent who is a citizen, legal resident, or member of the military."

Yet, rather than seeking two thirds of Congress and three-fourths of all the states to amend the Constitution, they now simply seek to redefine it by amending the Immigration and Nationality Act. ...

Since it’s highly unlikely their proposal will get very far, it raises the question of what Vitter and Paul’s goals really are. It’s one thing to argue in favor of a constitutional amendment. The arguments behind it are still beyond questionable, but at least they are based on a general agreement that the 14th amendment has been rightly interpreted throughout the past century. When people start arguing that the Constitution has been misread for over 150 years, it undercuts the legitimacy of the millions of Latino and Asian citizens who at some point in their family tree had citizenship conferred to them through an immigrant family member who came to the U.S. during periods when most foreign residents lacked formal “legal” status. Given the fact that Vitter and Paul waged two of the most blatantly racist campaigns last year, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s exactly what they’re trying to accomplish.

As we have reported, legislative efforts to exclude millions of people who were born here from the rights of citizenship are flatly inconsistent with the Fourteenth Amendment's plain text and its history, buttressed by over a century of case law.

A few weeks back, we captured video of Mike Huckabee being introduced by David Barton at the Rediscover God in America conference in Iowa, during which asserted that he wished every American would be forced - at gunpoint - to listen to Barton's teachings.

Last night, Huckabee appeared on "The Daily Show" and Jon Stewart ended up dedicating nearly the entire interview to questioning Huckabee about his support for and praise of Barton and his pseudo-history:

During the discussion, Stewart mentioned a few of Barton's more outrageous claims by name, which we first reported here - specifically Barton's claims that Jesus opposed the minimum wage and the Estate Tax and that God set the boundaries of nations.

For more examples of Barton's absurd statements and intentional misuse of history, take a look through our archive of posts about him.

A lot of people are feeling pretty good in Wisconsin right now, but Governor Scott Walker probably isn’t one of them.

Last night, his hand-picked successor to become Milwaukee County Executive (the office Walker left when he became governor) was crushed by a 22 point margin. And this morning Joanne Kloppenburg declared victory over State Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, a conservative activist who tied himself to Walker’s agenda.

While Wisconsin judicial elections are officially nonpartisan, Prosser is well known as a Republican who was quickly associated with Scott Walker. People in the state then began to realize that electing Joanne Kloppenburg to the bench to replace Justice Prosser would shift the 4-3 conservative majority to a 4-3 liberal leaning court, thereby affecting how the highest court in the state might rule when Walker’s law inevitably arrives at their doorstep for review.

In no time flat, the election took on huge significance as the contest turned into a referendum wherein voters could express their favor or displeasure with Walker’s anti-collective bargaining legislation while affecting the ideological bend of the court that will likely be the final word on the legality of Walker’s law.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Kloppenburg scored a 204 vote victory. Close? You bet, but that’s cold comfort for Scott Walker and the Wisconsin GOP who might be feeling a twinge of regret for pushing their extreme anti-worker agenda.

One would think that other Republicans would learn some lessons from this defeat and tap down their extremism a bit. In Washington, at least, that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser was supposed to win reelection in a walk, after winning a February primary with 55% of the vote. Prosser, a former Republican state assemblyman, faced JoAnne Kloppenburg, who previously served as the state’s assistant attorney general and came in second in the primary. But Governor Scott Walker’s brazen push to bust unions and implement an ultraconservative political agenda spurred the progressive community into action, and Walker’s popularity plummeted.

While the Greater Wisconsin Committee ran ads against Prosser’s reelection, pro-corporate organizations such as the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (an amalgamate of the Wisconsin State Chamber of Commerce and the Wisconsin Manufacturers Association), the Club for Growth, Citizens for a Strong America, and the Tea Party Express have flooded the state with ads supporting Prosser and berating Kloppenburg.

As of Monday, the four groups which backed Prosser spent a combined $2,177,220, but the Greater Wisconsin Committee spent $1,363,040. The final spending figures have not yet been tallied.

Citizens for a Strong America, a front group for the Koch Brothers-financed Americans for Prosperity, ran an ad so erroneous that the nonpartisan group PolitiFact gave it a “pants on fire” rating. Even the far-right Family Research Council added to the smear campaign, attacking Kloppenburg, who worked as assistant attorney general since 1989, as inexperienced in advertisements on thirty-four Wisconsin radio stations.

With a recount pending, Kloppenburg’s come-from-behind campaign shows the ability of progressives in states like Wisconsin to overcome the corporate juggernaut that is able to spend almost limitless amounts of money to support its favored candidates.

The day after the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, a group of undocumented youth in Atlanta honored him by applying his message of peaceful protest against injustice. Supported by civil rights leaders like Rev. Timothy McDonald – a PFAW Board member, the founder of the African American Ministers Leadership Council, and the chair of African American Ministers In Action – they engaged in civil disobedience and highlighted the injustice of laws effectively barring them from higher education because of their parents' immigration decisions. As reported in the Washington Post:

Eight young illegal immigrants were arrested Tuesday for sitting in the middle of a busy street in front of the Georgia Capitol, protesting their lack of access to higher education in a scene reminiscent of civil rights demonstrations decades ago.

The group, made up of mostly students, believe their plight is similar to movement the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led, and they met with former activists from the 1960s to hash out their civil disobedience plan. As the foreign-born youngsters sat in the road, at times holding hands, hundreds of supporters lined the street and cheered in support as the illegal immigrants were led away in handcuffs.

Before the sit-in the youngsters, their voices trembling, each stood before the crowd, took a microphone and announced: "I am undocumented, and I am unafraid." ...

The Rev. Timothy McDonald was one of the activists who met with the students at Ebenezer Baptist Church in the room where King and other preachers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that led the movement for equality and justice for blacks.

"We felt the connection," McDonald said. "We pointed out that there has never been a successful movement of any kind without young people, and that was especially true of the civil rights movement. It was the students who filled up the jails, not the preachers."

As these young people show, part of the strength and beauty of King's message is its universality

Mother Jones flags this paragraph from a Washington Post story on the tense budget negotiations that may lead to a government shutdown at the end of this week:

House Republicans huddled late Monday and, according to a GOP aide, gave the speaker an ovation when he informed them that he was advising the House Administration Committee to begin preparing for a possible shutdown. That process includes alerting lawmakers and senior staff about which employees would not report to work if no agreement is reached.

In 1995, for instance, it wasn't just government workers who took big hits, but tens of thousands of businesses somehow reliant on the government whether they knew it or not. And there were millions of Americans and foreigners as well who depend on government services like the provision of passports and visas.

An important difference between now and then is that the economy was growing more strongly in terms of employment. If a shutdown happens now, it would be at a time when the economy is much less robust.

So the House GOP is applauding a development that will almost certainly send shock waves through the economy, hurting Americans who work for the government, work for employers connected in some way with the government, or just need basic health, public safety, veterans’ or passport services.

The GOP’s budget ploy is not about jobs. It’s about pushing a far-right, pro-corporate agenda whatever the cost to working people.

A closely divided Supreme Court issued a seriously flawed decision today in Arizona Christian Tuition v. Winn, using constitutional sleight of hand to get around the Establishment Clause's prohibition against the use of public funds for religious purposes and to frustrate Americans' ability to go to court when the constitutional guarantee of church-state separation is violated.

Here's the background to the case, which involves the state of Arizona's program to support religious schools.

States are constitutionally prohibited from directly supporting religious education. So Arizona figured out a way to try to get around that inconvenient First Amendment by setting up a system where that money goes to the religious organization before it gets to the treasury.

Arizona has a program where taxpayers get dollar-for-dollar tax credits for money they give to "school tuition organizations" (STOs), nonprofit organizations that award private school scholarships to children. Many of the STO awards actually require parents to send their children to religious schools as a condition of receipt.

So an Arizonan can take a certain amount of money that he owes in taxes and instead give it to a religious STO to pay for someone's religious education. As Justice Kagan said during oral arguments, Arizona established the program so STOs, acting as state intermediaries, could "make distinctions that the state itself cannot make."

Essentially, the state has set up a money laundering scheme to get around the Establishment Clause.

However, before the Court could address the program's constitutionality, it first had to determine if the taxpayer plaintiffs have standing to sue. The Constitution prohibits federal courts from hearing a case unless the plaintiff has a personal stake in the outcome. Simply being a taxpayer generally does not give you such a personal stake. However, in the Flast v. Cohen decision of 1968, the Supreme Court recognized that federal taxpayers do have such a stake when they challenge Congressional spending.

The Roberts Court today ignored common sense and the reasoning of Flast and concluded that Arizona state taxpayers don't have standing to bring this case to federal court. As they did in the 2007 Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation case, the five conservatives acted to prevent courts from enforcing the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

According to the Roberts Court, there is no government spending here to contest. Instead, it is simply a series of independent spending decisions made by private citizens who are spending their own money, not the government's.

This is constitutional sleight of hand at its worst, which Justice Kagan pointed out in dissent. As she noted, the majority is making an arbitrary distinction between cash grants and targeted tax breaks for the purposes of standing: Either way, the government has financed religious activity, so either way, taxpayers should be able to challenge the subsidy.

Since there are times when no one other than taxpayers has suffered the injury necessary to challenge government sponsorship of religion, the majority opinion "will diminish the Establishment Clause's force and meaning." The dissent continued:

"The Court opinion thus offers a roadmap – more truly, just a one-step instruction – to any government that wishes to insulate its financing of religious activity from legal challenge. Structure the funding as a tax expenditure, and Flast will not stand in the way. No taxpayer will have standing to object. However blatantly the government may violate the Establishment Clause, taxpayers cannot gain access to the federal courts."

It is a good day for the religious right, and a bad one for the United States Constitution and the rule of law.

Today, PFAW joined the We Are One Campaign and hundreds of workers outside of Koch Industries in Washington, DC to protest the political activities of the Koch brothers, the notorious multibillionaires who are working to destroy unions across the country. American workers are tired of being scapegoats and are taking to the streets all across the country to say so. It was great to see so many people turn out today to put the Koch brothers on notice. The Kochs have spent millions on advancing their anti-environment and anti-worker agenda. They founded Americans for Prosperity, and contributed $43,000 to help elect Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who recently signed a bill to end collective bargaining for state workers.

Welcome to Ohio 2011, the state that has become the new laboratory for various right wing bills aimed at destroying Ohio’s middle class, and communities of color. And it just got worse for Ohio workers. Last week, Governor John Kasich, ignoring the overwhelming majority of Ohioans, signed into law a bill that all but eliminates collective bargaining rights for 350,000 public workers across Ohio. This law, couched as a way to close the state’s budget gap, is nothing more than an outright attack on working families. Kasich even predicted this day in March 2009 when telling a Republican audience on the campaign trail, “we need to break the back of organized labor in the schools."

Ohio’s new law, SB 5, will:

Limit collective bargaining rights for public employees, including teachers, police officers and firefighters.

Give elected officials the authority to resolve contract disputes with public employees.

Eliminate binding arbitration, which police officers and firefighters use to resolve contract disputes as an alternative to strikes.

Prohibit strikes by public employees.

Also, in a burst of equal-opportunity gay-bashing to accompanying its union bashing, the bill also includes provisions prohibiting the state from passing marriage equality legislation, including, apparently, the recognition of marriages in other states and possibly even the enactment of domestic partnership laws.

This politically driven law is very unpopular in Ohio. According to a poll released by Public Policy Polling on March 15, 2011, 63% of registered Ohio voters believe that public employees in Ohio should have the right to collectively bargain for wages, benefits, and working environment rules.

However, Ohio voters will have the last word in protecting the state’s working families. Ohioans from all corners of the state are already gearing up for our upcoming ballot battle. We will gather approximately 231,000 Ohio voter signatures for a November 8th referendum to overturn this legislation. And we will be victorious!

We must move quickly. Stay tuned for weekly updates on how you can become involved in helping to overturn this law!

Wisconsin Republicans have been using the threat of legal action this week to suppress dissemination of a video that they are, quite justifiably, embarrassed about. As reported by Talking Points Memo:

First the Republican Party in Polk County, Wisconsin, pulled the tape of Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) fretting about making ends meet on his $174,000 a year salary from its own website. Now they want it gone from the whole Internet.

For a couple hours, the local county GOP was successful. But we've put an excerpt of the video back up.

A day after TPM posted the video we obtained of Duffy talking about his salary at a Polk County town hall meeting earlier this year, the Polk County GOP contacted the video provider we used to host the video, Blip.tv, and demanded the video be taken down. ...

The county GOP took down the video from its blog after the Washington Post posted a short clip of it yesterday morning.

An official with the Polk County GOP, which posted many other clips of the town hall on its YouTube channel, told TPM yesterday that the video was taken down because it was "was being republished without our consent."

Duffy and his supporters are right to be embarrassed. However, they are not right to use copyright law to keep Americans from seeing and hearing Duffy's words for themselves. Copyright exists to encourage and protect intellectual property. It does not exist to allow an elected official to avoid accountability for his own embarrassing political speech. Nor is it intended to be used as a tool to harass those who criticize you, particularly when dissemination of portions of the video for news and commentary most likely falls within the fair use doctrine - an exception to the exclusive right of copyright holders.

How many bloggers out there without a team of lawyers to represent them are now worried about legitimately posting this video or others like it in the future? How much political speech is being intimidated this way?

Use of the law to squash criticism - particularly when there is a legitimate fair use claim - is not new. For instance, the National Organization for Marriage had Rachel Maddow take down her clip of a NOM audition tape that made viewers heap scorn upon the organization and its latest advertisement.

Molly Ivins once noted how then-Governor George W. Bush used the threat of a lawsuit to shut down an embarrassing parody website:

The parody, run by a 29-year-old computer programmer in Boston named Zack Exley, annoyed Bush so much that he called Exley "a garbageman" and said, "There ought to be limits to freedom." (That's not a parody -- he actually said that.)

Bush's lawyers warned Exley that he faced a lawsuit. Then they filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission demanding that Exley be forced to register his parody site with the FEC and have it regulated as a political committee.

In just the past few days, we have seen right wing groups use the law on public records as a weapon to intimidate academics who criticize them. But in a country whose freedom depends on robust and open political debate, the law should be used to protect political discourse, not to prevent it.

The University of Wisconsin has responded to the state GOP's request for the e-mails of Professor William Cronon relating to the clash over collective bargaining in that state. This was the opening salvo in a series of such requests to bully and intimidate university professors.

Talking Points Memo reports that the University has complied with the request, paying due respect to protecting academic freedom, among other values:

We are excluding records involving students because they are protected under [federal law]. We are excluding exchanges that fall outside the realm of the faculty member's job responsibilities and that could be considered personal pursuant to Wisconsin Supreme Court case law. We are also excluding what we consider to be the private email exchanges among scholars that fall within the orbit of academic freedom and all that is entailed by it. Academic freedom is the freedom to pursue knowledge and develop lines of argument without fear of reprisal for controversial findings and without the premature disclosure of those ideas.

Chancellor Biddy Martin also posted a message to the campus community to help ensure that academic freedom would not be chilled by the Republicans' assault:

Scholars and scientists pursue knowledge by way of open intellectual exchange. Without a zone of privacy within which to conduct and protect their work, scholars would not be able to produce new knowledge or make life-enhancing discoveries. Lively, even heated and acrimonious debates over policy, campus and otherwise, as well as more narrowly defined disciplinary matters are essential elements of an intellectual environment and such debates are the very definition of the Wisconsin Idea.

When faculty members use email or any other medium to develop and share their thoughts with one another, they must be able to assume a right to the privacy of those exchanges, barring violations of state law or university policy. Having every exchange of ideas subject to public exposure puts academic freedom in peril and threatens the processes by which knowledge is created. The consequence for our state will be the loss of the most talented and creative faculty who will choose to leave for universities where collegial exchange and the development of ideas can be undertaken without fear of premature exposure or reprisal for unpopular positions.

To the extent that the GOP hoped to find evidence that Professor Cronon was using state computers to engage in partisan political activities, they're out of luck:

We have dutifully reviewed Professor Cronon's records for any legal or policy violations, such as improper uses of state or university resources for partisan political activity. There are none.

But this should not be the end of the story. As we have noted previously, this incident should not be viewed in isolation. If the party officials involved with this are not held accountable for their overreach, this incident will do long-term damage. Continuing party support for those who undermine the foundations of our free society significantly lowers the bar for what departures from the principles of democracy are now acceptable.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa has plans to launch investigations into everything from Wikileaks to the mortgage crisis, but a high-profile hearing he held yesterday showed some…interesting priorities. Issa was concerned that the Department of Homeland Security inappropriately required Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests to be vetted by Obama Administration political appointees, in a process that has since been revised. The only problem? He couldn’t find any evidence of actual wrongdoing:

Narrowing most of Chief FOIA and Privacy Officer Mary Ellen Callahan's answers to a, "yes or no," Issa asserted she forwarded FOIA requests to DHS political appointees, who then evaluated the information based on how embarrassing or politically sensitive it was.

Despite Issa's claims, however, both the written committee findings and a report issued by the DHS inspector general found the privacy office did not engage in unfair or illegal politicization of FOIA requests. Throughout the hearing, Callahan insisted no FOIA requesters were disadvantaged because of their political party or area of interest.

"To my knowledge, no one other than a FOIA professional made a substantive change to a FOIA release," Callahan said. "The department was not engaging in spin. They just wanted to know what was in the documents."

Maybe it was the lack of evidence that caused Issa to withhold thousands of pages of documents from the Democratic staff of his committee until early this week:

Republican Committee staff obtained at least 7,200 pages of documents from an independent source. They shared approximately 1,900 pages with the Democratic staff in February, but they waited to share an additional 5,300 pages until Monday of this week.

So what did Issa’s investigation into DHS’s FOIA practices find? Politico’s Ben Smith points to one object of controversy illuminated in a report by the committee’s Democratic staff, an extended discussion about whether or not it was appropriate for the department to redact curse words and catty comments made by a government employee about Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s wardrobe. The report concluded:

This evidence does not indicate that the swear words or comments about the Secretary's attire were political in nature, or that information in these documents was withheld for partisan political purposes.

So Issa’s brave investigation revealed that the news media was denied access to some rude and irrelevant comments government employees made about each other, for reasons that were not political.

Glad we took the time to get that settled. Now about that mortgage crisis?

The New York Times today reports on what it calls the “odd alliance” between populist-seeming Tea Party groups and corporate lobbyists. The paper’s investigation into a Tea Party group’s all-out campaign to boost the profits of an Indonesian paper company is illuminating, but it shouldn’t be surprising. Since its start, the Tea Party movement has been tied to, and financially supported by, giant corporate interests. In January, PFAW’s Jamie Raskin wrote about the corporate agenda behind many of the Tea Party’s legislative priorities:

The 2010 congressional elections should have been centered, at least in the domestic sphere, on three freshly minted corporate catastrophes made possible by industry regulatory capture and systematic deregulation: the subprime mortgage crisis that caused a multi-trillion dollar collapse on Wall Street and the destruction of millions of peoples’ jobs, incomes, pensions and housing security; the BP oil spill, which wrecked an entire regional ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico and registered as the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history; and the collapse of the Massey Coal corporation mines in West Virginia that killed 25 mine workers after the company had been cited dozens of times for unaddressed regulatory violations.

In the wake of these disasters, the Tea Party skillfully mobilized public anxiety about the direction of American politics but turned it against President Obama’s efforts to deal with the mounting crises of the society. Tea Party activists drew Hitler mustaches on photographs of the president and decried health care reform, which they called “Obamacare” and described as a totalitarian plot. They railed against President Obama’s efforts to get BP to set up a $20 billion fund to pay the victims of the British company’s recklessness and unlawful conduct: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), a Tea Party hero, denounced Obama’s “redistribution of wealth fund” and Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) apologized to BP for being “subjected” to “a 20 billion dollar shakedown” by the president. And, in the debate over financial reform, the Tea Party joined other conservative Republicans in seeking to give Wall Street a free pass for the appalling predatory actions and crimes that brought our economy to its knees. Today, many Republicans, flush with Wall Street money, are calling for a severe dilution or outright repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act and have placed a bull’s-eye target on the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the entity charged with protecting the public against fraudulent and deceptive financial practices.

While Tea Party Republicans are claiming to take the high ground on government spending, they vote to throw millions of dollars at reviving a program that the Department of Education has shown is ineffective. After studying the program for four years, the Department found that use of a voucher had no statistically significant impact on overall student achievement in math or reading. The results were the same when the Department looked only at students who had applied from schools in need of improvement. As the Obama Administration stated in opposing the bill: "The Federal Government should focus its attention and available resources on improving the quality of public schools for all students. Private school vouchers are not an effective way to improve student achievement."

So if the program doesn't educate kids effectively, what exactly does it do?

For one thing, it helps religious schools stay open. This voucher program has been in existence since 2003, and more than three fourths of the students in it have used these government funds for private religious schools. While Congress is slashing government spending on public education in communities across the country, the House decided to throw a few million dollars to keep religious schools afloat. This raises significant First Amendment concerns.

It also insults the 600,000 residents of the District of Columbia. The mayor opposes this program, as does Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. If the people of DC wanted a voucher program, they would adopt one, something they have never done.

Finally, it furthers the right wing's drives to privatize core government functions and get around First Amendment restrictions on government-funded religion.

For some people, those are apparently good enough reasons to support the bill.